skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the part on "How arbitrary is the origin, really?" is not correct. The origin is arbitrary. As the Wikipedia article points you you can pick any point, whether or not it is the origin, and use the James-Stein estimator to push your estimate towards that point and it will improve one's mean squared error.

If you pick a point to the left of your sample, then moving your estimate to the left will improve your mean squared error on average. If you pick a point to the right of your sample, then moving your estimate to the right will improve your mean squared error as well.

I'm still trying to come to grips with this, and below is conjecture on my part.
Imagine sampling many points from a 3-D Gaussian distribution (with identity covariance), making a nice cloud of points. Next choose any point P. P could be close to the cloud or far away, it doesn't matter. No matter which point P you pick, if you adjust all the points from your cloud of samples in accordance to this James-Stein formula, moving them all towards your chosen point P by various amounts, then, on average they will move closer to the center of your Gaussian distribution. This happens no matter where P is.

The cloud is, of course, centered around the center of the Gaussian distribution. As the points are pulled towards this arbitrary point P some will be pulled away from the the center of Gaussian, some are pulled towards the center, and some are squeezed so that they are pulled away from the center in the paralled direction, but squeezed closer in the perpendicular direction. Anyhow, apparently everything ends up, on average, closer to the center of the Gaussian in the end.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this result. Perhaps it means that mean squared error is a silly error metric?
> but what most people think it means is that if time were wound back and replaced, a person could have made a different choice than they previously made.

I disagree and I think the paper I linked literally proves that people do not think this way. Per the paper, most people agreed with "source Compatibilism", where people considered an agent responsible if they were the ultimate source of the choice. I recommend reading the paper, it's well done and very accessible.

> In what way were you free to choose one and not another? I contend that you are not free to choose what thoughts pop into your head. Where is free will then?

The freedom to choose according to your desires. The fact that you don't have a choice in your desires doesn't seem relevant.

Think about it mechanistically: suppose you have a machine learning model that can act as an intelligent agent, and this model responds to moral feedback, eg. you tell it when it did something morally wrong or right, and it updates its internal state to reflect what it's learned and makes better choices in the future. It's capable of abstraction and generalization in order to learn general moral principles rather than merely memorizing specific rules.

After some period of training, doesn't it seem reasonable that you could trust such an agent to make ethical choices, no matter what its initial state was? Even if you initialized it with maximal hostile intentions, but it still operated basically the same as one initialized with maximal altruistic intentions, they would both converge roughly to similar points on important moral questions.

Maybe the hostile one might be a little more selfish in circumstances of moral ambiguity where the other will still err on the altruistic side, but I would argue you can still mostly trust it to make ethical decisions.

Such agents still probably won't be perfect, and where they mess up we would require more ethical feedback to update its internal state that drives its decision procedures.

What is this feedback loop if not holding the agent morally responsible for its choices? How are humans any different from such mechanistic agents? As children we know little but have certain proclivities towards selfishness or charity, and adults teach us when we've done something right or wrong, and we internalize and generalize that kind of logic as we mature. We don't have a perfect system for determining when someone is fully mature and ready to make ethical choices, but the heuristic of 18-21 years old seems to generally work.

The initialization state doesn't seem particularly relevant. Maybe the hostile agent prefers ice cream where the altruistic agent prefers chocolate bars, but this isn't really relevant to whether they are free to make choices according to their internal reasons, and whether they respond to being held morally responsible for poor choices.

The only freedom worth having is the type that lets you choose according to what you value, and that turns out to be the kind of freedom we do have.
How to style React applications while the world burns around us (2020)
Complexity is the outcome of misunderstanding. The misunderstanding can come from lots of areas.

It could be from a requirements perspective: “I understand what I can build easily, but not what you want.”

It could be from an engineering perspective: “I understand what you want, but I don’t understand how to build that cohesively.”

It could be from a scientific perspective: “No one knows what tools we need to investigate this.”

I saw mentioned in other comments that CAD software doesn’t allow for sketching. As someone who was originally trained in drafting the old way, and who has used modern CAD systems to produce models for fantastically large physical simulations, I largely agree that sketching is lost. But the sketching that I can do on paper is just not at the same level of complexity as I can kinda do on my computer.

But the complexity of using the new tool obscures the fact that my model is much more complicated than I could otherwise manage using old tools. And that’s because I’m still learning. In fact, I have to “deploy” while I’m still in learning mode about a problem, unlike before, where I had to understand the problem in order to use the tools to draft the thing.

Being able to do something with a half-formed idea sounds like sketching, but when non-experts rely upon it, it’s pretty fragile. Because it wasn’t done.

Building a memex (something the author disparages multiple times) is super hard because we still don’t understand how to represent ideas separately from language, our original mental sketching tool. But people built Altavista and Google and LLMs anyway. And yeah, they’re super complex.

How does TCP/IP work over wireless connections? Poorly and with a lot of complexity. Why? Because the concept of a connection is ill-defined when communication relies on ephemeral signaling.

But despite the complexity, it is useful and fun to use only half-baked ideas. Just like it’s fun to use language to describe stuff I don’t understand, but merely experience. Graduation. Being a parent to a sick child. Losing a loved one.
How else would you implement C++’s vector::operator[] for example?

This to me is the clearest example of something that’s safe in Rust, and impossible to make safe in C++.
The above post isn’t about specific details, it’s about the idea of individuals being scolded into trying useless ‘solutions’ to problems caused by the mismanagement of entire industries. Industrialized farming involves a lot of pesticides. Acting as if the problem will get better if people just let pests eat their small garden plots is dumb.
After reading the article, I can only conclude that Ancestry is being a perfectly good actor on the web? They're respecting robots.txt files, they're properly summarizing with source citation instead of verbatim copying, etc. and they make that information available for free. That's literally doing what every search engine on the web has ever done. Better, honestly, because not all search engines respect robots.txt in the slightest.

If anything, both the isle of man and aberdeenshire memorial folks seem to misunderstand what the web is, and what putting data on the web means.

(And from a legal perspective, I am amazed they can lay any sort of claim to the genealogical facts; you can certainly own the copyright for "an entire work", but you can't own the fact that person X and person Y begot person Z)
According to an article quoted by another poster, they are growing slower. The rate of growth is decreasing. It is reasonable to assume that without another keystone event, we are past the halfway point in the growth curve, and peak ownership is less than double what it is currently.
I find this tongue-in-cheek commentary very amusing, especially considering the article is a perfect example of describing feel-good bikeshedding, rather than addressing actual issues that were called out (e.g. large scale farming and loss of habitat due to human development)

If you want to read more, you can start at a very high level by Googling habitat loss and industrial agriculture, I guess?
Why do you think this paper wouldn't exist if it was about a OneWeb project?
Fortunately we have not just one but two competing band designators – IEEE (widely in use in e.g. satellite communication; L-band, Ku-band, Ka-band etc. come from that nomenclature) and EU/NATO (which seems somewhat obsolete) :)

In addition to that, hams (in study materials and exams) use wavelengths, which is always "fun" to convert from/to frequencies.
> Akhshually Jesus would have been speaking Aramaic.

Actually, like most people in the world, and especially people in "border lands", if he existed, he probably will have been multilingual. Aramaic for sure, but he might also have spoken some Hebrew, Greek and maybe even Latin.
> If I were the one writing, an easy test is passing the documentation to a lay person and asking them if they have what they need to perform X by following the documentation.

What kind of documentation is this though? Is this how to bake a cake or tie a necktie, or is it how to setup a reverse proxy for the services in your k8s cluster?

If it's something a lay-person could do then I think this is a good strategy (though depending on the size/scope of the project/documentaiton it does seem like a pretty big effort to undertake without compensation), but if it's something highly technical like Traefik, I expect a lay-person to not even understand half the words/vocabulary in the documentation, let alone be able to perform X by reading it and following it.
I wasn’t aware of this law so it may or may not be a good law. One thing I noticed was the statement that it will be offered at “no extra cost” which is a bizarre thing to say. Can’t a manufacturer of a large thing with many components just slightly increase the cost of each part to cover the cost of the required thing? What fantasy land do people have to live in to think that something will be forced on a company and that company won’t somehow make up the gap somewhere else? It’s not like airbags or rear view cameras are magically free.
I began note-taking at school when I would make extensive hand-written notes (using colored pens) to study for examinations.

I continued this practice at college and credit my success at school and college in large part to the confidence I created in the "memory" that my written notes gave me.

I continue to feel that I have a very poor memory and so note-taking has become a lifelong skill|tool.

Hand-written notes are best for me to actually remember (without recourse to my notes) but I almost entirely swype|type notes today because of the benefits of accessing them anytime (any device), searching etc.

I try to keep my note-taking DRY and prefer to update|correct older notes rather than recreate content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself

Here's my current practice:

1. I write technical blogs partly to share but equally to document for my own purposes; I have a blog called "snippets" (co-opted from a Google practice) where I document tips-and-tricks from coding (e.g. how to set up Protocol Buffers proto_paths when using Visual Studio code)

2. I keep arbitrary notes in Google Keep. My shopping list was migrated to Keep too and, I write trip packing lists and the humans' names at the dog park (keyed by their dog's name, of course) there too.

3. Google used to have (!?) an excellent practice that everyone in a meeting recorded meeting notes in real-time in Google Docs. I would comment-ping people with to do items.

4. Until recently, I used Google Docs for record my programming notes. Every day, I would add a new H3 header for the date with "Actions", "To Do", "Miscellany" sections. I have 3 years of one project's development recorded this way and it served me well. However, as the document grew in size, it became unwieldy and I was forced to split it into two documents (before|after) which made it less useful. I've begun (though it's also imperfect) using Markdown and a Hugo static site to record the same content. Now, each day is a dated Markdown file. This scales better. I prefer using Markdown. It's just as accessible but it's not as good for searching.

5. I contribute to Stack overflow and I've a GitHub repo for every answer I've ever worked on. When I write code or explore a technology, just as everywhere else, I document the solution (as a README) and commit it to the repo. This is mostly for my benefit because it allows me to quickly find technologies that I've worked on.

My coding velocity is slowed by my sometimes obsessive desire to make notes but, note-taking has paid me so many dividends over the years. For example, I rarely feel anxiety that I know I've used an obscure tool, programming language or some such but am unable to find a record of this; reading my extensive notes gives me a thorough play-by-play of what to do.
Apparently, this is because of a standard they're required to conform to, not database software in specific:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265929

> As far as I can tell, this isn't an issue with the specific database itself, but the standard they are required to record geographic data in, which the end of the article mentions as "BS 7666".

On the other hand, you’re naïve if you think English hasn’t already been simplified to fit on machinery such as typewriters and cheap printing presses. This process began long before computers.
I recently moved and wanted the post office to forward my mail. I could fill out the physical card or I could go online and fill out a form and pay a $1.10 fee for verification. The fee was small enough that I thought it was worth saving the hassle.

As I write this, the other browser tab for the post office web site is still displaying the 'loading' window with no end in sight after I entered all my info. I guess it is back to doing it the hard way.

IT IS the small things...
Working with Resourceful Routes in Ruby on Rails
Zombie Trainers and a New Era of Forced Labor
As a layman it seems like the natural follow-up is to figure out how to grow tooth buds from stem cells and implant them, which in theory would allow people to grow whole new sets of teeth.
Is anyone scraping Ancestry.com?
I love this project. I believe reading code is a great way to learn, and unfortunately the popular editors are essentially illegible due to their age and/or scale (VSCode, Vim, Emacs). This project appears to be ~37k lines of simple C with a single runtime dependency (iconv.) Amazing.
plausibly people don't have many such high-powered am transmitters around any more, but also much less dental work is metal now, and the metal is of more consistent quality, so less chance of oxidizing into one of the numerous metal oxide semiconductors in your mouth. it seems to have been a pretty infrequent phenomenon even at the time, one in tens of millions
Breach of a Face Recognition Firm Reveals a Hidden Danger of Biometrics
What is an example of a real use case for such where the data owner would rather do orders of magnitude more compute to generate the results in the fancy new ZKP format, compared to hosting a simple API that processes the exact same queries and returns the exact same amount of information as the adversary would get in the ZKP strategy, but using classical means?
Losing your cryptos when a trusted intermediary steals them or loses them through incompetence (Quadriga CX) is so common that crypto fans invented their own name for it! (Rug pulling)
> You know where the language originates and why is it called French?

Yes, it originates in Italy, and it's named after a group that once occupied part of the area where France is now. They spoke Frankish, a language unrelated to French.

Interestingly, in Asia, the French are often referred to as "Franks", or rather by an interpretation of the word "Frank" in the sound system of the local language as it existed a few centuries ago.
Al Jazeera condemns Israeli government decision to shut down channel
https://archive.ph/9dehB
They're useful for different kinds of emergencies. Nobody said one of them subsumed the other. You might as well say "when was the last time 911 helped you? I just used a first-aid kit last week and it saved me from my bleeding."
"Supply skepticism and shortage denialism are pushing against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing...
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/06/05/go...]

Gold will always have value because it is fundamentally scarce, and nearly impossible to destroy - due to its very nature.

It isn’t the end all be all - but it has its place. Like when there is no universal agreed upon form of exchange between entities.

Going off something where rarity is a fundamental property of the universe as we know it, seems as good as we can get right now eh?

As to why Platinum or the like doesn’t have a similar place is a good question to ask - one of history though I suspect. Why is Bitcoin more valuable than Bitcoin Cash?
This is something life changing for some of us. I grew up in an area where water has a lot of fluoride and we didn’t get to know until I was 16.. side effect is I have very brittle teeth.. I’ve shattered a couple due to bad rice (had a small stone in it), lentils, sliver of bone … Now, the kicker is Colgate et al have been marketing fluoride toothpaste to the same region to people facing fluorosis knowingly - profits above all else. so if this treatment comes through, I’ll be lining up!
Because they are too busy watching TV or playing with their phones. Everyone used to have a lot more time, now "nobody has time" even tho life was much harder 100yrs ago yet those ppl found plenty of time for all kinds of social and volunteer events. It's the time sucking media leaving no time to be bored and thus motivated to seek out stimulation

> don't understand why more adults don't have awesome hobbies...
"If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security. In some cases, this will mean prioritizing security above other things we do, such as releasing new features or providing ongoing support for legacy systems."

Can someone explain the implications of this decision ?
I feel this. I don't think I'm bad at the job but I feel like most jobs I would want to do are being rapidly targeted by AI efforts. It seems like the safest jobs are ones I don't want to do (I.e. manual labor, etc.)
While I clearly agree, what I've experienced in my career (including other non-G FAANG / MAGAM / whatever it's called now companies) is that one will get some help over chat to fix some issue, but think "this is such a small issue that will only happen once" or just get too busy with other stuff and neglect to properly write up documentation or put it in one's PKM effectively.

Having chat history and being able to type "chat:"Bob Joe" mitigation jitter identity server" or whatever search query to dredge up the single useful command that slipped through the PKM cracks is so useful.

I guess one is forced to be disciplined about it, but I wonder if Google knows whether this chat-curtailment policy is basically costing them millions in wasted dev time because they have to re-ask for help and bother people. However, in my current company (using Teams), I still get re-asked for help all the time and usually quote reply my prior message saying "please search for this before asking. I found it easily".
I haven't worked with STEMs before, but with Two photon and confocal setups. My bet is everything around the microscope is probably going to cost as much as, possibly even more the microscope itself. E.g., a good optics bench will set you back several thousand, and they are extremely heavy. STEMs also typically operate in a vacuum at very low temperatures approaching absolute zero, so you will some liquid nitro handy to cool your sample as well as a way to pump all the air out.
> I think everyone would do well to avoid "but I don't need it, so it seems unnecessary" kinds of arguments

This is an uncharitable characterisation of what I said.

> References get returned all the time because you want to access some state store's vector of things without copying the vector just to ask "are any of the elements X?"

This is what const references are for. Returning an optional<vector<T>&> to query if it contains an element would not be appropriate.
Greed is not a requirement of Capitalism though.
Hard agree. It’s infuriating that automation is continually added to human centric processes that it is ill-suited and anti-social to be used in, very much including most LLM applications, always in the name of more bloody cost-cutting that almost never leads to lower prices for consumers, just more yachts for the executive class.
Fo any other professions have thse challenges?

Our lack of basic professional certifications has just led to nonsense in every corner of the hiring and job seeking process.
Article 2021:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09521...

Seminar 2021:
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/maths/research/events/seminars...

Article in archive 2023:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08194

Video 2021:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS_k6L638k0

Extension to stochastic models where KAN builds the distribution 2023:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hhJIpzxPR0
For the American case, the USPS has a free API to do address validation and standardization.

USPS APIs in general:

https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/#dev

https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/documentation-u...

The specific API:

https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/address-informa...
Because like most safety features, AM radio matters most in rare situations that people don't think about when they're purchasing a vehicle. If we let the market work it out we'll find that we lose access to AM radio because people won't notice until they need to tune in to a traveler information station and can't because their radio doesn't support AM.

Then we'll get a bunch of people who are either ignorant of the conditions or who are fumbling with their phones trying to find the information on the internet somehow.

We could phase in a new traveler information system that works in new cars, but that would require an enormous expenditure of resources to roll out the new system and then we'd have to maintain the old one for as long as there are vehicles on the road that don't support the new. It's far more cost effective to just mandate that all vehicles be able to receive signals from our existing system.